Tag: hear

When I served Temple Beth Solomon of the Deaf in Southern California, I worked to learn how to say my prayers in ASL, American Sign Language. As is always the case with translation, there were some tricky bits about making the words of the prayers truly available to the congregation. The first word of the Shema, the central prayer of Judaism, is usually translated “hear.” The problem is that to say that word to a group of Deaf people would lose the very essence of the prayer, because it immediately exclude them.

This dilemma is handled in various ways in various Deaf Jewish communities, but at TBS, they use the sign for “understand” to translate “Shema.”

This led me to think about other ways to translate the Shema into English. “Hear, O Israel” always seems formal and, well, rather passive, and the passage itself, (Deuteronomy 6:4) is emphatic, not passive. Here are my thoughts: